Sexual Practices

Context

One of the biggest crises that the digital worlds introduced was in debates around body, gender, and sexuality. Apart from the often demonised world of pornography and fundamental responses to sexual freedom, there have been various philosophical and practical issues that emerge with the cyberspaces.

Different disciplines have embraced the digital spaces as spaces of reflection, research and political mobilisation around questions of gendered sexual practices. The digital interactions have also led to new forms of sexual interaction and practices which have found some academic attention. It is necessary to disassociate questions of sexuality and sexual practices from notions of obscenity or demonised public discourse.

Contemporary scholarly work from gender and sexuality theorists and practitioners engages with how the traditional notions of what it means to be human, to be gendered and to appropriate sexuality, have been challenged by the virtual worlds. As we move towards a post-human existence, the fixed structures that were used to definitively define the normal, the regulated, the contained and the chastised, get deconstructed. Within such a fluid world where relative norms and normative relativity are a way of being, it is imperative to focus on questions of gender and sexuality as they get mediated, constructed and inflected by new digital cyberspaces.

Research Agenda

1. How do different gendered and sexual minorities find their voice, agency and ability for political mobilisation through the cyberspaces?

2. What are the prejudices and discriminations that internet technologies inherit despite their avowed neutral nature and potential for larger inclusivity?

3. What are the challenges that the new digital technologies pose to our understanding of what it means to be human, to be gendered, and to be sexual?

4. As digital sexuality becomes a part of our larger techno-narratives, what are the spaces of liberation and celebration that it opens up for the individual?

5. How do we escape the populist media sensationalism around cyberspace and sexual practices to engage more fruitfully with the new paradigms and practices that emerge with digital interactions?

6. As we move from representation to simulation, how do varied sexual practices offer new pedagogic ways of understanding the body and its social dynamics?

7. What is being sought in the demonization and horror that gets constructed around cyberspaces and sexuality?

8. In the post-human world, how do we understand questions of sexual practices? How do we gender these new narratives and forms that emerge in digital spaces? What are the aesthetics and politics of online sexual practices and how do they help us re-think existing notions of human sexuality?

9. What are the political mobilisations that challenge the normative world of sexuality? How do processes of regulation, monitoring and governance get inflected by introducing questions of sexual practices online?